People I Know (DVD)

People I Know

Eli (Al Pacino) is a low-rent public relations man in New York City, with only one "big-name" client, aging movie actor Cary Launer (Ryan O'Neal). After a messy one-night stand with a young starlet/party girl (Tea Leoni)--think Lindsay Lohan--Cary asks Eli to babysit the young lady until she is due to fly back to LA the next morning.

Well, Eli has a bit of a drug problem, and so does the girl, so he doesn't resist too much when she insists on taking him to some kind of floating opium den (sort of like the old floating crap game in Guys & Dolls, but more upscale).

There's some kind of electronic "toy" she left at the party earlier in the evening that she is determined to find. Once some big name business men discover she is there, they insist that she leave the party and have her escorted to the elevator. As the elevator door closes, she holds up the toy and says "I've got you all now!"

Eli is too stoned to ask her what she's talking about or why she was kicked out of the party. Anyway, he takes her back to the hotel, but at some point the toy falls out of her bag, and Eli unconsciously sticks it in the pocket of his overcoat.

He later passes out in her hotel bathroom, but semi-wakes up to see someone attacking her in bed and then passes out again. He leaves the next morning, and assumes she is just sleeping in bed.

Well, as you probably guessed by now, he later hears on the news that she has been murdered. The police want to question him, and surprise, surprise, his main client, Cary, suddenly wants to dump him, and brings a big sack of cash to Eli's office as a kind of severance package.

Eli is furious because he just spent the past night babysitting Cary's party girl, plus he promised a lot of people that Cary would appear at a big African-American event up in Harlem that evening. Eli is one of the organizers, and it is a pet project of his.

In the meantime, Eli's late brother's widow (Kim Basinger) is waiting for him at her hotel. Apparently they had a history together before she married his brother, who has recently died (Are you following this?). She wants to start things up again with Eli, and he's obviously attracted to her, but he's uncomfortable with the whole "brother's wife" thing.

And that's when my kids woke up, and I had to put on Sesame Street. So if someone else saw the end of this movie, please fill in the rest.

Thanks!